The theme for this month is 'The Holidays'. IE - an image of what the December holiday season means to you. Festive, cynical, traditional, it's up to you! Please do be sensitive to other members though.

Please include a sentence or two with your photo describing what you were trying to achieve and if there were any particular challenges in doing so.

We're all enthusiasts here, so it's also great to see what equipment you used and the settings too. So please also include the following:

Submissions will close at midnight GMT on 31 December 2007. The final poll will follow.

Please remember this thread is for submissions only and that posted images should be around 500 pixels on their longest dimension. If you'd like to comment on any of the submissions or ask any questions, please do so in the December 2007 comments thread!

Well, someone has to be first so here's an easy target for you all to improve on!

The village Christmas tree was "switched on" this evening so I thought I would see how well my 40D would cope. The metering did a great job but the floodlights to the left of the tree for the carol singers gave the sensor an impossible task. I'm pleased with the noise performance at ISO 1600 though

Coming from the UK, I'm more used to a Northern Hemisphere Christmas with a dark and chilly December - and don't get me wrong, I love it! But down here in New Zealand, December is fast-approaching the height of Summer and we're experiencing hot, bright sunny days which stay light until well-into the evening. So I thought I'd post an image to represent Christmas down here - not a barbie on the beach, but a close-up of the flower of the beautiful Pohutukawa: the 'New Zealand Christmas tree'. Technically speaking I wanted one flower in focus and the others blurred, so selected a reasonably open aperture in aperture priority mode - had I used f2.8 on the Nikkor lens, hardly anything would have been sharp! And in the far background, the blue sky of a Summer's day! (note, this tree is most common on the North Island, and this shot was in fact taken in Auckland).

Here's my festive entry. Christmas isn't such a big thing in China. In the big cities like Beijing and Shanghai everywhere is decorated for the seasonal festivities, but here in little ole' Taiping...it's non-existent....except in my house

For this image I had a bit of fun with my new Sigma 10-20mm. To add a bit of Chinese flavour to my Christmas image, I put my little statue of a Terracotta Warrior (more famously used as the Immunity Idol in Survivor China!) at the base of the tree on a box with a bit of tinsel around it and shot from the ground upwards.

Processing wise, shot in Raw, adjusted exposure, straightened and cropped the image then levels and curves, saturation and contrast. The biggest processing part was adding a gaussian blur layer mask to blur the background to make the statue and tree stand out more.

Hope you like it, the Sigma is such a great lens for playing around with perspective.

I was surprised when I checked out the assignment yesterday, I had just been out snapping Christmas displays, like I knew what the assignment would be. Anyway, my suburban Calilfornia town has gone crazy with lawn displays this year -- you'd never know we were in an energy crunch. Every block has at least two or three of these crazy displays.

This picture was taken around 6:00PM with a Nikon D50 using a 70-300 VR lens on tripod (with VR off).

I live in California now, but I grew up in Canada and Christmas was always full of snow, which was so magical to me as a child. The other night this snow globe caught my attention and brought back some childhood memories of playing out in the cold with snow falling. I always remember snow falling on Christmas Eve while looking out the window; epic in hindsight. That may sound corny, but in Northern Alberta, it always snows at Christmas... so I tried to capture the memory.

The only challenge, albeit minor, was dealing with how fast the snow fell after being shaken. It took a few times.

Title: It's Snowing Inside

Camera Model: Canon 30D
Lens and focal length: Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L at 40mm
Aperture: f/5
Shutter Speed: 1/60
Sensitivity: ISO 320
EV: -1
Flash: Did not fire
Exposure Program: Normal
Metering: Spot
Post processing:
Adobe Lightroom processed the CR2 file. I left the sliders alone on this one and suprisingly the WB is 'As Shot' at 3550. Lighting comes from a lamp that is right next to the globe on an end/tea table.

Well, I love reflections of light, actually "ray-tracing"! I love dark and moody pictures!!
I love red and gold!!!
So this was the chance of a lifetime to get all this in a single shot The challenge was to get the exposure right, between the light from the candles and the ambient light.
Camera Model: D80 (yeah!)
Lens and focal length: Nikon Vr 18-200mm (what else!)
Aperture: F/5.6 (no exp. comp., aperture prio.)
Shutter Speed: 1/10 sec (handheld!)
Sensitivity: 1600 (!)
Post processing: cropping, exp. correction -1EV, darkening background, D-lighting 1
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Warning: the link goes through to the original (3627 x 2267) sized image. All layed out for you to see how an ISO 1600 pic from a measly Nikon D80 looks like...

This was my first attempt at using the built-in flash of the D40 as diffused light (for this, I placed a piece of white paper in front of it, to try and have some of the light bounce from the ceiling).

December holydays remind me of peace and quiet, next to a roaring fire.

My holiday picture is a close-up of my family's Christmas tree. In this shot I simply wanted to try and capture its beautiful detailing and lighting.

The hardest part was to get a shot which I liked and I think this one is my favorite. I was also happy to discover that by using a large depth of field and slow shutter, it gave the lights a star-like appearance. Hope you like it

I'm new around and I wanted to contribute a little, posting one shot from a very particular place in my home city. This is a garden of light flowers with a huge gardener figure on the side of a main road that has been placed every Christmas for the last 2 years. It just turned a dark place into a very nice spot.
The other issue is that I shot this picture with my Cybershot W90 since my EOS 40D is on a plane right now in a tour around the United States. It was made without a tripod and believe me, it was a tough one. I hope this counts too.

Cybershot W90
ISO 100
1" F2.8
0EV
AWB
Some cropping in CS

Last edited by Camut on Sun Jan 06, 2008 9:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.